Great videogame concepts with bad executions

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Reactor
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by Reactor »

kodi wrote:Red Faction is a game with some great ideas and that really isn't that enjoyable to play past the first couple of levels.
I dunno, I kinda liked Red Faction. Sure it was sort of a disappointment after watching Total Recall, but hell...what did I expect anyways? The game is not about the movie!
The implemented stuff is awesome tho. The destructible terrain is something which VERY few FPS games utilized (I only saw it in Duke Nukem 3D, in certain spots) and it clearly showed that his development team was on the right track. The storyline was also pretty neat, with that Mars Ultor security chief helpin' ya, the arrival of the evil mercenaries hit me like a boulder, and the presence of civilians was also quite a pleasure, as 99% of FPS games features only the hero (you) and a gazillion enemy units. No civilians, no animals, nothing. And the vehicle levels were surely unique, as most FPS games didn't even feature usable turrets, let alone whole vehicles! Not even ID games offered such variety in vehicles!

I can understand however, why you'd give this game a dishonorable mention. The destructible environment wasn't utilized that frequently, not even in its sequel with General Sopot, the bossfight with Capek is ridiculously hard, and defeating that mercenary leader at the end was damn glitchy (Fusion Rocket Launcher won't kill her, but precision rifle does? What the actual f...?), and the capture part was unnecessary, and cliché. The first occassion of losing all stuff was much more thoughtful and awesome, when you must infiltrate Ultor's main headquarters in a suit, and leave most of your stuff behind. And many mercenary weapons are damn overpowered, such as the Rail Driver. Of course I die after one hit, but sometimes they could survive 3 hits from it! And I wasn't playing on "hard".
All in all, my impression is that Red Faction had its fair share of glitches, but it is still good enough to stay on the "good" side, or at the mediocre side at least :)
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by 0mrcynic0 »

Not sure if anyone heard about this game, it's one of those horrible shareware fighting games released during the 90's...along with Battle of the Eras and Battle Wrath.

Creepers duking it out - GREAT.

Execution - VERY BAD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pacPfZf4H3I
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Scripten
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by Scripten »

Reactor wrote:
kodi wrote:Red Faction is a game with some great ideas and that really isn't that enjoyable to play past the first couple of levels.
I dunno, I kinda liked Red Faction. Sure it was sort of a disappointment after watching Total Recall, but hell...what did I expect anyways? The game is not about the movie!
The implemented stuff is awesome tho. The destructible terrain is something which VERY few FPS games utilized (I only saw it in Duke Nukem 3D, in certain spots) and it clearly showed that his development team was on the right track. The storyline was also pretty neat, with that Mars Ultor security chief helpin' ya, the arrival of the evil mercenaries hit me like a boulder, and the presence of civilians was also quite a pleasure, as 99% of FPS games features only the hero (you) and a gazillion enemy units. No civilians, no animals, nothing. And the vehicle levels were surely unique, as most FPS games didn't even feature usable turrets, let alone whole vehicles! Not even ID games offered such variety in vehicles!

I can understand however, why you'd give this game a dishonorable mention. The destructible environment wasn't utilized that frequently, not even in its sequel with General Sopot, the bossfight with Capek is ridiculously hard, and defeating that mercenary leader at the end was damn glitchy (Fusion Rocket Launcher won't kill her, but precision rifle does? What the actual f...?), and the capture part was unnecessary, and cliché. The first occassion of losing all stuff was much more thoughtful and awesome, when you must infiltrate Ultor's main headquarters in a suit, and leave most of your stuff behind. And many mercenary weapons are damn overpowered, such as the Rail Driver. Of course I die after one hit, but sometimes they could survive 3 hits from it! And I wasn't playing on "hard".
All in all, my impression is that Red Faction had its fair share of glitches, but it is still good enough to stay on the "good" side, or at the mediocre side at least :)
The main problem I had with Red Faction is that their design process seemed to go like so:

"Hey, we have this revolutionary new gameplay mechanic that could allow for tons of player ingenuity and nonlinear level progression!"

"Excellent! Let us make the entire game past the second or third map entirely out of corridors built from indestructible terrain."

Not that I would say that Red Faction is "bad". It's just kind of a lackluster HL-era FPS.
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

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That's correct, this is why I noted that this awesome new feature wasn't used as much as it should have been used to make something truly unique. It was quite a disappointment, and once the player is out of the mine, it remains just to give a false impression of freedom.
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by Caligari87 »

I chalk that up to a problem with game balancing in the wrong direction. Red Faction (along with many other games between Doom and Halo) seems to have been in this weird era where resource management was basically non-existent as a game mechanic, but having just a modicum of restraint would have fixed the issue. Instead of "the player can bypass whole levels using their rocket launcher so we need indestructible walls/doors" they should have said "let's make rockets rare enough that players need to decide whether to tunnel, or save ammo for battles."

8-)
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by Amuscaria »

leileilol wrote:Hexen II
Out of curiosity, did you ever finish Hactoria? I remember you were making the Succubus replacement for it, but I haven't kept up on the progress after that.
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Re: Great videogame concepts with bad executions

Post by leileilol »

The succubus was modeled and animated, it's the lack of programmer interest and support at the time.

Because at the time, to export one model for it, i'd need to:

- Export to MDL using a 2.3x-only Blender script
- Open the MDL in qME, change the palette to Hexen II's, and then reimport the model texture and set the model flags (for blending/particle trail properties where appropriate)
at this point, the MDL's vertices would appear VERY wobbly. Hexen II has a MDL format change to accomodate that (specifically for Eidolon) but no MDL export script acknowledges it.

There wasn't an automated or easy way to do this every time I want to export a MDL for it, and i'd still have to run it as a Hexen II mod so the dependency was still unfortunately there.

I felt bad about the concept art going to waste in this unfortunate outcome so i've modeled Succubus again in a higher poly form for OA3 since, and also figured out that skyblue/purple looks best for her. :D

Nowadays the Hexen II community is in a sad Zdaemon-ish state - a bunch of pirating moochers, so if I did do the project again it'd be ignored in favor of some repack with stolen content from everywhere, 'enlightening' random forums on the internet to join them.
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